Industrial deburring techniques have been known since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. A very common technique is that of manual deburring which is time-and cost-intensive. Consequently, other techniques have been developed in an attempt to reduce costs and include barrel tumbling, centrifugal barrel tumbling, spindle finishing, vibratory deburring, abrasive-jet deburring, water-jet deburring, brush deburring, sanding, chemical deburring, and others. A discussion of each of the above mentioned deburring techniques, and others not mentioned hereinabove, is found in Deburring Technology for Improved Manufacturing, written and edited by LaRoux K. Gillespie, Society of Manufacturing Engineers, 1981. Automatic, computerized systems for deburring are not known to the inventors.
Automatic systems for some machining tasks have been developed. U.S. Pat. No. 4,618,924 discloses an automatic milling system using constructive solid geometry modeling. A solid model of the part to be milled is defined and a path which the milling tool will follow is automatically generated. The tool path is created by replacing every primitive shape included in the solid model of the part and replacing it with an offset primitive, larger or smaller than the part by the cutter radius. As mentioned in the patent disclosure, the milling method will leave material according to the natural scallop height between passes and where the cutter cannot penetrate the part due to its radius.